PowerBI.tips

Milwaukee Brew City PUG – August 2020

August 31, 2020 By Mike Carlo
News Events
Milwaukee Brew City PUG – August 2020

Back again with another Power BI User group for Milwaukee. This month Mike and Seth walk through the beta release of external tools. If you didn’t see the announcement from Microsoft but in July of 2020 was the release of External tools.

What are External Tools? I’m glad you asked. An External Tool is an application that can be used along side with Power BI. Parameters can be passed from Power BI desktop into the External Tool, such as a connection string to the data model.

We are super thrilled about this new ability to enhance the Power BI desktop experience so much that we built a custom installer that will enable users install many of these external tools all in one place. This is why we build Business Ops.

Watch this month’s PUG to see how to install External Tools for your machine.

#power-bi

Previous

One Tool to Install them ALL

Next

Update 'Enter Data' Table in Service without full Publish

More Posts

Jul 21, 2026

The Hype of Rayfin – Ep.547

Mike is deleting paid subscriptions and rebuilding them as Fabric apps; Tommy wants to know who maintains all this and whether enterprise security teams will ever allow it. Plus the licensing discovery of the episode — agents talking to semantic models over XMLA with no Power BI Pro license required.

Jul 16, 2026

Teaching Orgs to Question Themselves – Ep.546

Show the same chart to two people and one says "makes sense" while the other asks for the source. Mike and Tommy dig into motivated skepticism, why a report that says a team is down is never just a number, and how to release data without wrecking the boat.

Jul 14, 2026

Agents Helping with Data Governance – Ep.545

Agents will not run your data governance program — most of governance is a committee, not a computer. What they will do is the mundane discoverability work: cataloguing models, surfacing ambiguous definitions, and making lineage human-readable.